Golden Hill, Francis Spufford’s joyous romp through 18th-century New York, has added the Royal Society of Literature’s prestigious Ondaatje prize to its growing list of accolades. Describing the novel as “an unpredictable, exhilarating, protean novel”, the judges placed Spufford’s fiction debut at the top of six titles shortlisted for the £10,000 prize, which goes to a book of fiction, nonfiction or poetry that best evokes the “spirit of a place”.

Announcing the winner, judge Henry Hitchings praised the author’s “sense of texture” and his ability “not just to reconstruct the topography of a cultural moment far from our own, but to make the details so delicious”. He added: “Golden Hill stood out as a book with an astonishingly rich understanding of place. It’s a densely woven portrait of colonial New York, teeming with vitality and humanity.”

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The judges were unanimous in their praise of Spufford’s recreation of New York in its earliest years, which Hitchings said drew on “profound research to evoke the spirit of another age, yet wears that research lightly”. Fellow judge Mimi Khalvati said: “An unpredictable, exhilarating, protean novel, Golden Hill also captures the vein of darkness, the fear of the other, that runs through American history.”

Accepting the award at a ceremony in London on Monday night, Spufford joked: “Since all that remains of the place that I evoked in my book is a street plan and a metal railing, I feel that I must point out that I made it all up.”

Golden Hill, which has already won the 2016 Costa first novel prize and is a finalist for the Desmond Elliott first novel award, is written in mock 18th-century prose, and draws on Henry Fielding for inspiration. It tells the story of young Mr Smith who arrives in New York – at this point a scrub of a port populated by chancers, entrepreneurs and ne’er-do-wells – with a bill for £1,000, much to the suspicion of the locals.

It is the Cambridge-based author’s first venture into fiction, after five critically acclaimed nonfiction outings, including the Orwell Prize-nominated Red Plenty, which fused fiction and nonfiction in a history of the USSR during a brief period under Nikita Khrushchev.

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On publication, the 53-year-old told the Guardian that Golden Hill had started off as a nonfiction history of the US city, but the characters of Smith and Tabatha had “wandered over from the other side of my brain”. He added that it had taken him so long to try fiction because “because it’s taken me that long to be on reasonable terms with my own psyche”.

Spufford has said writing a novel felt “more honest” after a career in nonfiction. In an essay for the Guardian he wrote: “Good writing in fiction is always doing an impossibly large number of things at the same time, and most of that happens beneath the surface, where the reader never sees it directly.”

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The book won from a strong shortlist dominated by debuts. Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata was the only title on the shortlist that was not by a first-timer. Of the remaining four contenders, three were novels - Rebecca Mackenzie’s In a Land of Paper Gods, Kei Miller’s Augustown and Barney Norris’s Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain. The sole nonfiction shortlistee was Amy Liptrot’s memoir The Outrun.